Drawing Blood

Chapter Twenty-nine

The bullet ended up in a drawer, out of sight. I spoke to no one about it. Not even Adam.

It didn't stop me thinking about it, though. Nor did it stop me thinking about what had taken place during that entire evening. As I drove back to the tiny town I would be calling home, I recalled how the rest of it had gone without strain. After our conversation, neither Stefan, nor myself, acted as though our betrayal occurred; resuming our loyal positions quickly, and as soon as Adam returned. When that happened, I had found myself playing the role of a faithful lover, once more - alongside Stefan, who morphed back into the surrogate father, rather than the adversary.

We had done it in a bid to mask our deception. It was as though the whole scene never happened, was never written. Again, my justifications had ruled, and I had thought to myself: this was done in everybody's best interest, no one needs to get hurt, and to announce it would be foolish. It had merely been some surreal blip in our little drama, I told myself; an improvisation that had been spontaneously added to our performance without even consulting the director. And when the main actor arrived back on stage, we picked up where we had left off, pretending everything was fine, falling back into our carefully constructed lines.

It was a traitor's performance, really.

But a necessary one, at that.

There was no welcome party waiting for me, when I returned. In fact, Will was preoccupied, having had an eventful weekend himself. I had half expected him to be grumpy, given that he wasn't able to come with me - that, and our curt exchange on the phone had already given me a taste of what was to come. I hadn't even stepped through the front door before he gave me some disturbing news. Apparently, Annie hadn't been the only one hounded by Chris in my absence. He had been, too. Coming back from his fishing trip, late on Sunday night, he explained that he had pulled into the driveway, desperate for a decent night's sleep, only to find the determined journalist sitting on the top step with a pen in one hand and a notebook in the other. After a brief exchange, it hadn't ended well. And as to be expected, Will had not been impressed by the unwelcome visitor. I can only imagine it took a few minutes for Chris to realise he'd made a huge mistake.

Not only was Will unlikely to give Chris any information on Dan, or his death; not simply because he'd picked the wrong time to accost him - the cold weather and lack of a catch putting him in a foul mood - but he wasn't going to be polite or make things easy for him. When I spoke to Annie on the phone about the incident, later that evening, she was angry, too. However, when I mentioned how Will had responded, by chasing Chris off the property with his gun, she couldn't stop laughing. "Serves him right!" she exclaimed. And then I heard her tell the dog to stop barking, before asking Mitch to take it for a walk. "The little shit must have figured out I alluded him, then thought he'd try his luck with you: only, he didn't bargain on you not being there."

I couldn't agree more with her. As my gaze wandered around my bedroom, taking in the clothes strewn about the place, I began wondering if Adam had been right. Perhaps he did need to scare Chris off. Perhaps that was the only way. We needed to concoct a plan to deal with him, otherwise things would get out of hand. However, if Will kept behaving like a madman on a mission, we could always assign him with the task. It would probably work just as well. "Why did he think I'd be okay talking to him at that time of night, anyway?" I spoke. "Why wait until now to approach me?"

"I don't know," she said. "I do know he was sitting outside the store for almost two hours, waiting for me to lock up. I would have loved to have seen the look on his face when all the lights went off, and no one came out the front."

"Remind me how you got out of there again?"

"I climbed out the window."

She had said it matter-of-factly, but I still found it hard to imagine her as anything other than the eloquence of femininity I knew her to be. To do something so tomboy would have been her last option, and I was certain it wouldn't have made her happy. As she spoke, I could picture her sitting on her Laura Ashley sofa, in her satin pyjamas; her face free from make-up, but somehow still managing to look all dewy and graceful, the two lines above her nose pinching together as she recalled the past events. Even when we were youngsters, it was her who managed to remain intact and pretty; whilst I always ended up with scraped knees, and grazed palms; one pigtail higher than the other where I had caught it on a branch. "I managed to scrape my back, doing so," she muttered, breaking my vision. "I should sue him for that."